Dear Susan, I should be working now but instead I’m writing to you. You see, I’m a procrastinator. Please help me stop putting things off! Signed, Puttingthingsoff in Peoria Dear PiP, I’m so glad you asked. I am great at procrastination. Here is one thing I do to procrastinate: I …

Worry is addictive, plain and simple. It hits the same pleasure center of the brain as alcohol and other addictive substances. If you are able to control your intake of other addictive substances, then you can control worry, now that you know how addictive it is.

It’s a common occurrence in New York and other cities. You put your key in the lock of your apartment building and someone is about to follow you inside. What do you do? Usually in the interest of security I ask if the person lives there and then request they …

My New Year’s resolution is to learn how to play Angry Birds. But an essay in the New York Times suggests that daydreaming increases creativity. Daydreaming requires time, time I dump into playing Words With Friends. Words With Friends, though, is more than just words. It’s confirmation that my sister, my …

When I, always the initiator, smile at a stranger and the stranger smiles back, it puts a musical note in my step. Or in my pedal, as was the case on Christmas Eve day. I was on a long bike ride from New Jersey to Staten Island and, when a driver …

In my post My Year of Blogging, I noted that writing personal essays involves catching yourself in the act of thinking and then exposing and exploring it on the page. Here’s something I do every single day, and it was not until this morning that I caught it in my …

One day, after hours of sliding my cursor from Twitter to Facebook to Stats for my blogs and back to Twitter, when I should have been writing, I emailed Dr. M, a cognitive therapist. Dr. M had previously helped me understand that worry is an addiction; it hits the same pleasure …

At heart, I’m as much a salesperson as a writer. In 1978, I was recognized by Merrill Lynch for ranking second in opening new accounts among their first-year stockbrokers. During my next career, back in the days of print, selling my essays was harder. Some of my articles received a dozen …

Note to those of my peeps to whom Twitterspeak is as foreign as Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan-ese: You may not want to slog through this one. If you do, RT means retweet. I spend a lot of time on Twitter sharing links to articles I write. I have cultivated a variety of followers. …

While shops experience brisker business on weekends, blog traffic slows, at least mine does. So I’m posting this shortie today, hoping for weekend visitors. What I’m about to write is one of those things I wouldn’t give a second thought to, were I not examining myself all the time for …

I’m a saver. Every time my inbox mounts to the limit of 4,000 emails, I move a few thousand to random folders I doubt I’ll ever find again; and then I’m set for another few weeks of not deleting messages, mainly from the likes of Sock Hop Sundays, Hot Tub …

For my recent article on Home Goes Strong about Happiness at Home, I interviewed my blog crush Gretchen Rubin, whose book The Happiness Project–the same name as her blog–was a #1 New York Times best seller. Gretchen keeps a one-sentence journal, which she admits sometimes expands to 4 sentences. Says Gretchen, …

When I’m in New York, I like to hang out and write at Jack’s, a coffee place in the West Village with a patina that suggests long afternoons of sipping lattes and tapping on laptops. The overall look is shades of brown, like paper bags and coffee. Jack’s is so …

You can tell a lot about a person’s life from the files they have open on their browser. Eugene, my computer guy, says I shouldn’t keep so many files open. But like with my desk, if I put things away, I’ll forget about them. So I leave them out and …

My very first Mr. Wrong told me, “Susie, what you need is a purpose.” That was in ninth grade. George, now a retired psychiatrist, was right. The benefits of having a purpose were never more obvious than after I launched my blog. The irony of blogging about being a worrywart, …

The fawns scamper across my backyard like teenagers off to a pep rally. Despite a few scares–days when I didn’t see the emaciated-looking mom in my yard–Mama deer has been here too. But I’m still concerned about her. After I wrote “Oh Dear, My Deer” about how worried I was for …

If your mother has recently died, here is a post I wrote for you. Saturday, July 2, 2011 Mother died today. I am not trying to channel Camus, just trying to make sense of how it feels to suddenly become a 65-year-old orphan in New York while my mom’s cold …

If I had already fulfilled my fantasy of ordering Worrywart t-shirts, I would make this a contest to attract some kitchen-gadget experts. And, for my blog, new converts. I’ve heard Web surfers love contests and t-shirts. How embarrassed should I be if no one gets back to me with either …

I’m drowning in junk, buried in boxes, suffocating with stuff. It doesn’t surprise me that all these metaphors point to an untimely end. There would be great irony in getting snuffed out by my stuff, since one of my biggest worries happens to be that I’ll drop dead and my …

What if I meet a guy I like? Monday: He gets up. I want to stay in bed but now I can’t fall back to sleep. Or, I get up and he wants to sleep, so I can’t turn on NPR. I make myself French toast and a cappuccino and …

Unrelated announcement: My new post “Divorce, Downsizing, Dating & Death.” Share your thoughts. In a previous post 10 Days in New York: Lessons Learned, Worries Amassed, I mentioned seeing a flier that said simply “Sarah Needs a Job .com.” I was so intrigued by this that I went to Sarah’s …

Are the doors locked? Am I on the right train? Is there spinach in my teeth? There’s spinach in your teeth; but isn’t it too late, too awkward to tell you now that we’ve been talking for 20 minutes? Have I re-read the email I wrote enough times to hit …

Unrelated announcement: How Couples Resolve the Thermostat Wars & Other Domestic Battles Sometimes I think my memories are based solely on photographs. My kids won’t forget anything the way they record themselves every time they change clothes, then post and tag the results on Facebook. Come to think of it, I’m …

UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: See article 7 Easy, Delicious Aphrodisiac Recipes. A variety of search terms leads Googlers to my blog, some weirder than others. My voyeuristic pleasure from reading a daily list of these terms is infused with a measure of guilt. Generally, we Google in the privacy of a bubble that …

Unrelated Announcement: Check out my recent Home Goes Strong article “Brain Food . . . Simple Recipes to Delight Your Palate & Your Mind.” How do I strike a balance between time spent living and time spent documenting? For example, when traveling, my anxiety about documenting rises. Should I sit …

Riddle: Every family has them, what are they? Answer: Nicknames that are too embarrassing to expose outside the home. After coffee with friends, I return home, open my front door and call to my bassety beagle Casey, “Casemaster General, where are you?” To say he’s non-responsive overstates his activity level. …

At times it’s a challenge to dream up worries to write about. For one thing, my busy blogging schedule helps keep my usual disaster scenarios at bay. For instance, I haven’t worried about bedbugs since yesterday. Other times I get excited about three ideas at once and can’t settle into …